No House for God, But a Dynasty for David

23rd Sunday after Pentecost 

2 Samuel 7:1-17
October 23, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Bible has a strange relationship with David. On the one hand we have the Sunday School David, or rather Davids.

David is a shepherd boy who, when he gets bored watching his family's sheep, practices slinging stones. He even learns to scare off predators with this useful trick. One day he manages to use this skill to fell the giant Goliath, the Philistine warrior who had been defying the armies of Israel under King Saul. Goliath challenged any Israelite warrior to single combat, but the Israelite warriors were reluctant. "You fight him." "No, you fight him." Nobody wanted to fight Goliath, even if it meant getting Saul's daughter for a wife. David wasn't experienced enough to understand that he couldn't fight Goliath, so he volunteered. Goliath was heavily armed and armored. David just had his sling and a couple of stones, but he was an accurate shot and he won.

The other Sunday School David is David the harpist and singer, the composer of psalms. David played and soothed the spirit of the more-than-a-little unhinged King Saul.

After some stuff happens and some other stuff, David becomes the King of the Israelites and establishes his capital in Jerusalem.

Always after that, David is remembered as the ideal king and Jerusalem as the city of God. There will always be a king of David's line to sit on the throne in Jerusalem. Even the Messiah is to be born in David's line. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke both have Jesus descended from David, although their genealogies are not reconcilable. No matter. David is Jesus' ancestor. Even the Apostle Paul who doesn't seem to be interested in the details of Jesus' life says that Jesus was a descendant of David.¹

On the other hand, Jesus himself argues that the Messiah cannot be descended from David. Did you know that? Well, it's only one saying, even if it is in three of the gospels. In Mark 12 and its parallels in Matthew and Luke, Jesus fends off questions and arguments from Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians about taxes, the resurrection, and the greatest commandment. Then he has a question of his own:

"Why do the legal experts say that the Christ is David’s son? David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said, The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right side until I turn your enemies into your footstool.’ David himself calls him ‘Lord,’ so how can he be David’s son?"²

Mark records that the large crowd gathered in the Temple "listened to him with delight."

Why the delight? Maybe because the crowd knows that kings are not such a good thing. And David, in particular, once we step back from the "Once and Future King" idealized Sunday School version, had some pretty serious shortcomings. That's true even if we leave aside the story that everyone already knows: how David used his position as king to coerce the woman next door into his bed and then tried to cover it up by calling her husband home from the war and, when the husband proved to have more honor than the king, contrived instead to have her husband killed. David, in short, was a warlord who waged a decades-long rebellion against the reigning king. When his right hand man brought the war to a successful conclusion, David blamed him for "touching the Lord's anointed." David treated his first wife miserably even though she had risked her life to save his. David was a charismatic user with a talent for military strategy. David was the sort of king who wages war, gathers glory for himself, and leaves a trail of widows and orphans behind. He is, in reality, a familiar character. History is littered with his sort. And the common people are the ones who pay the price for his history-making. Maybe that's why the people were glad that Jesus painted a picture of a Messiah who was not coming to them in the pattern of David.

And maybe that's why the priestly scribes who set down in final form the story in our reading for today were clear that the Temple, that center of priestly power, was not to be connected with David. God doesn't need a house, certainly not a house from the likes of David.

David had already moved the ark of the covenant, the box that was the place of God's presence among the people, into his city. It was David's city, the city of David, because he had captured it and it belonged to him. With the ark in his city, the ark was under David's control. That was bad enough. But to build a Temple, an impressive and permanent monument, to house the box was just too much. Even Nathan the royal prophet, inclined to rubber-stamp everything that David did, found this to be a step too far.

The reason that Nathan gives is most revealing. Nathan speaks for a Yahweh who longs for the freedom of the past when the people of God wandered from place to place in an empty land following their God in an immediate and intimate relationship. "I haven't lived in a temple from the day I brought Israel out of Egypt until now. Instead, I have been traveling around in a tent." And now, David wants God to settle down, to put down roots (in his city, of course), to live in a Temple, a building. You can call it whatever you like, but a building—even if it is made of cedar or marble—is essentially a box. David wants God in a box, even if it means that God loses God's freedom. David wants God in a box, the better to use God as a tool in the art and exercise of political power. David can bring God out when convenient and useful for governance and banish God back into the box when God's job is done. This is the role that kings (and political candidates) have in mind for God. But this king at least will not put this God in a box.

It is an amazing thing that, as pro-Temple as the Hebrew bible is on the whole, there is a strain of anti-Temple thought that got past the priestly scribes, a strain of thought that remains in the text. We can see it again in Jesus' ministry. You remember when Jesus took Peter, James, and John up the mountain and Jesus was changed in his appearance and Moses and Elijah appeared and talked with him. Do you remember that Peter came up with the brilliant idea of building three boxes, one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah? And how this idea was quashed by God who spoke from the cloud? God is not fond of structures.

The word that we translate as church in the New Testament actually means "assembly" and it was what people called the city council in their local communities. "Assembly" is a political term or, more precisely, a counter-political term. The church was the alternative assembly in each town. Nowhere in the New Testament does that word refer to a building. Of course the church met, but always in the homes of its members, never in buildings dedicated to that purpose. For us, though, church means a building first and only then an assembly.

In God's resistance to being "temple-ized", in God's nostalgia for the days of desert wandering we are being warned. One of God's character traits is freedom. God is not bound to any place. God is not bound to any structure, whether that structure is a building or an organizational chart. God is not bound to any political agenda or theological point of view. God is free. We do not build a structure, whether of bricks or of committees, and expect God to fit into it.

We are the people of God. We follow God. We watch. We wait. We look for signs. We listen for God's voice. And then we follow. We go where God goes. We are the people of God.

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1Romans 1:3

2Mark 12:35-37.